Épisode 13 : World’s Best Dad

Réalisateur : Mark Piznarski

Reviews/Critiques :

http://www.spoilertv.com/2014/03/cri…tpNIYk.twitter Personal opinion The premise might sound a bit similar to CBS’ Hostages. However, there are quite some differences. You can imagine that the stakes are so much higher on Crisis since it’s not just POTUS, but the entire powerful elite of D.C. Another difference is that, while the hostage situation on Hostages was mostly kept under wraps, the crisis situation on Crisis is all over the place. The only real similarity is the central question of the shows: what will you do for your child/children? I enjoyed the pilot and it’s done enough for me to watch more episodes. The question is: how long can they keep it up? Hostages had 15 episodes, some of which were a bit pointless and unnecessary. Crisis has 13, which I am sure can be filled with the material. The writers have already had an unscheduled hiatus after the sixth episode to make sure they stay on the focus of the pilot and don’t stray too much away from their premise (something that Hostages might have suffered from as well). While this might be worrisome for some, I just think it’s a good sign that the producers can be critical of their own work and rework things if they don’t go as planned. Back to the pilot. I must say that it sometimes feels a bit rushed. That is not necessarily a bad thing, but I had to rewatch the pilot to make sure I hadn’t missed anything. I also had trouble keeping some of the teenagers apart from one another as some look a bit alike. I suppose that will improve once I see some more episodes and get used to the characters. There are two major reveals in the pilot: one about halfway through and the other one at the end. The reveal halfway the pilot is a nice twist that changes the story for certain characters and your view on them. The twist at the end felt a bit rushed, and I had to rewatch it to make sure that it really was a twist. This one includes family issues and changes the motivations of characters. Of course the pilot also ends in a cliffhanger as one main character gets a phone call and needs to ask himself/herself the question: how far are you willing to go? TV Eye-What to watch the week of Mar10-16- Sunday, March 16 Crisis (10-11 pm, NBC) The short-lived Life (2007-9), starring Damian Lewis and Sarah Shahi, was one of my favorite “brilliant but canceled” shows of the past decade, so when I learned that its creator is behind this new series I was hopeful. But the storyline—a group of privileged teens is kidnapped in order to manipulate their powerful parents—falls quickly into an abyss of tedium, and despite the presence of talent like Gillian Anderson and Dermot Mulroney, the show suffers in the same way as many other series (Hostages, The Killing, 24) that try to build an entire season around a single case or event. http://the-lfb.com/2014/03/10/tv-eye…ch-10-16-2014/http://www.buzzsugar.com/Crisis-TV-Show-Review-34317892 What it’s about: While on a field trip, a bus full of students from one of Washington DC’s elite high schools is hijacked. A team of terrorists forces the students — plus its parental chaperones, hello Dermot Mulroney — to a remote location. Now, FBI agent Susie Dunn (Taylor) has to cooperate with her politically connected but estranged sister (Anderson) in order to get to the bottom of the mass kidnapping. Where it works: So far, the show is really great at building tension and keeping you guessing. You might think you know who’s good and who’s bad, but there’s a lot of potential for everything to change. The stakes are also incredibly high: the president’s son is one of the hostages. Where it doesn’t: Some of the dialogue is cheesy and a bit laughable, but hopefully they can refine the tone over the next few episodes. You might like this show if: You were excited about (but ultimately disappointed by) Hostages. When it’s on: Sundays at 10 p.m. on NBC (beginning March 16) xxxxx http://torontoist.com/2014/03/televi…iracies-in-it/ It’s unclear why Crisis is open-ended rather than finite in duration—kind of like it’s unclear why Under The Dome was extended to a second season (a second dome maybe? Who knows). Again, we have here an action-thriller series with a premise that limits the timeframe of the show by design (in this case, a group of terrorists takes a busful of children of important/powerful people hostage so they can call the important/powerful people and threaten to murder the kids so the important/powerful people will follow their commands). What happened to the miniseries? Miniseries were a good idea for exactly this sort of story! Anyway, Gillian Anderson is in this, so we’ll end up watching it, but man, think these things through, TV people. (NBC, 9 p.m. Sunday) Honourable Mention: Crisis (Sunday, March 16, NBC/Citytv). It’s a bad pop-culture week for ex-cons, but an even worse one for kids. In Crisis, an elite-high-school field trip goes very wrong when the bus is ambushed and the children of the world’s most powerful people — including the U.S. president — are kidnapped. When the bad guys can suddenly blackmail everyone from the president to high-ranking diplomats, from military leaders to the business elite, they can accomplish pretty much anything. These kids offer golden tickets to all kinds of shenanigans. Will their high-and-mighty parents become thieves, spies, traitors and killers in order to keep their children safe? Is there a Kardashian relative on the bus? Will Bo from Believe make a series crossover and save them all? So many questions. Gillian Anderson plays an all-powerful CEO, the mother of Amber, one of the kidnapped girls and — if I know my screenwriters — a love interest for the president’s son. Dermot Mulroney plays Thomas Gibson, one of the trip chaperones and kidnapping victims. http://www.calgaryherald.com/enterta…medium=twitterReview from Entertainment Weekly The crisis on “Crisis”, starring Dermot Mulroney and Gillian Anderson, is the abduction of privileged high schoolers – children of the rich and powerful, including the president’s son – by a brainy rogue with uncertain motives. As Secret Service rookie (Lance Gross) and an FBI agent (Rachael Taylor) are trying to save the day, but will you want them to? The brats are prima facie so irritating that by the sixth minute, I wanted a Hunger Gmaes turn just to see them suffer. There’s some interesting cheek to the pilot, particularly the villain (“Today, the bug is king!”), but rote directing and too-serious acting muffle the fun. Some character twists are intriguing. If it let itself be more B-movie buggy, Crisis could be a better thrill. C+ Jeff Jensen “Crisis” Which brings us to “Crisis,” starting on 3/16, and boasting A-list stars, high production values, and a complex kidnapping plot…and I just don’t care. Maybe it’s because I’ve seen too many shows like “Crisis” but this one just left me completely unengaged. The dialogue is flat, the plotting is boring, the characters are predictable, and the whole show only serves to remind one what well-paced programs like the net’s “The Blacklist” or the premiere of “Believe” do well. You need to keep the wheels spinning fast enough that suspension of disbelief is easy to maintain. When there’s one too many coincidences or when a performance rings false, the air seeps out of a project like “Crisis”. Ballard High is home to the children of some of Washington D.C.’s most elite power players. And they’re going on a field trip. A veteran secret service agent shoots the new guy on the job and helps coordinate an ambush on the bus, kidnapping the teens aboard. How far will the rich and powerful go to get their kids back? And how much will they pay? Gillian Anderson, so great recently on “Hannibal”, makes everything a little better and Dermot Mulroney and Rachael Taylor certainly aren’t “bad” here. But they’re all playing characters that are little more than devices to drive a nonsensical plot. They’re not people. They’re cogs in the thriller machine. And, as such, they’re dull. There’s no engagement with any of these people, no reason to care. And no reason to think that “Crisis” is going to break NBC free from their recent pattern of failed dramas. http://www.rogerebert.com/balder-and…a-resurrection xxxxx From Studio System News–preview of top 10 new series for Spring– CRISIS NBC- 3/16, 10 p.m. While CBS’s kidnapping drama Hostages was petering out among critics, NBC was just starting production on their own version of such a premise. Though the team is reluctant to put it in such words, behind-the-scenes there was a lot of creative restructuring that could be argued was to avoid similarities and comparisons to the lackluster predecessor. It is worth tuning in simply to see how Crisis handles a now-common concept in a unique and thrilling way, but the star power of stars Gillian Anderson, Dermot Mulroney, and Rachael Taylor certainly sweeten the deal. http://www.studiosystemnews.com/ssn-…10-new-series/From The Times Union- Hostage dramas should be among the easiest television shows to create. After all, it stands to reason that as long as one or several characters are held captive, you can hold the audience as well. Maybe because the formula looks so easy on the surface and because it’s such a staple of film and TV, there’s often a temptation to gussy it up one way or another — that’s what CBS has done with the limited series “Hostages,” for example. The problem is, the more stuff you add to the formula, the more you’re in danger of giving that captive audience reason to escape. The first two episodes of new thriller “Crisis,” premiering Sunday on NBC, avoids some of those traps, but not all of them. Do cliches abound? Do they ever. But “Crisis” is moderately entertaining thanks to well-paced direction, some competent character development, and the presence of Gillian Anderson in the pivotal role as a take-no-prisoners corporate CEO. A class trip for private school students in suburban Washington, D.C., turns to mayhem when their bus is ambushed on a remote country road, a Secret Service agent is wounded and most of the kids are spirited away by masked bad guys. The reason rookie agent Marcus Finley (Lance Gross) and veteran Agent Hurst (Wyatt Andrews) are trailing the bus is that it’s packed with the children of D.C’s rich, famous and powerful, including Kyle Devore (Adam Scott Miller), the president’s son. In the chaos of the ambush, Finley manages to get away with one of the students, chubby, brainy outcast Anton Roth (Joshua Erenberg), while the rest of the class and parent chaperone Francis Gibson (Dermot Mulroney), a former CIA analyst, are taken away. Gibson was never rich or powerful, even before his career as a CIA analyst blew up. But his daughter, Beth Ann (Stevie Lynn Jones), is a scholarship student at the school. She and another scholarship kid, Ian Martinez (Max Schneider), are routinely bullied and ostracized by many of their privileged classmates. At this point, “Crisis” gets writerly. How about having the lead FBI agent Susie Dunn (Rachael Taylor) be the estranged younger sister of tycoon Meg Fitch (Anderson), whose pretty, popular daughter Amber (Halston Sage) is on the bus? And what if there’s another complicated link between them we don’t know about for a while? That particular big reveal stretches credibility to the limit, but is key to the artificiality of character motivation and plot developments. The best and most credibly written character in all of this is pudgy little Anton Roth, and Erenberg nails his role. The other actors have to get by on their own talent because they get minimal help from the script. As you might expect, Anderson is such a magnetic actor we barely notice the contradictions in how her character is written. Mulroney is a good actor as well, but the script pretty much does him in. In spite of its shaky construction, “Crisis” gets our attention, at least in the first two episodes. The action is so rapid-fire, you probably won’t notice the fragility of the overly-complicated premise. If we remain on the edge of our seats as “Crisis” continues, the problems will diminish. If not, the entire contraption may very well fall apart. David Wiegand is The San Francisco Chronicle’s executive features editor and TV critic. E-mail: dwiegandsfchronicle.com Twitter: WaitWhat—TV http://www.timesunion.com/entertainm…on-5304310.php Anderson is as watchable as ever, radiating intelligence and giving her businesswoman character a convincingly intimidating presence without slipping into caricature. http://www.oregonlive.com/movies/ind…3/post_54.html